“My stepmother was no beauty. She was round and squat with a face not unlike a potato that had been scrubbed.”

“She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty years. At the end of it she was still singing.”

“She was utterly unlike what she had been when he first saw her. Both morally and physically she had changed for the worse. [...] He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined it.”

“Dana had four beautiful eyes. She wore glasses. But her eyes were so beautiful that the glasses only made her prettier. With two eyes she was pretty. With four eyes she was beautiful. With six eyes she would have been even more beautiful. And if she had a hundred eyes, all over her face and her arms and her feet, why, she would have been the most beautiful creature in the world.”

“I thought it was her wicked stepmother who poisoned her...''...Turned out the wicked stepmother had an alibi.''...Seems she was off poisoning someone else at the time. Chance in a million, really. It was just bad luck.”

“She was a beautiful woman, fresh-scrubbed and wholesome. Just like his ex-fiancee. A heartless floozy in disguise.”